Amateur: Your 'Foolish' Questions About Gender Are Worth Their Weight in Gold

In the media, gender identity is often spun as a linear narrative: You’re either born in the right body or the “wrong one.” If you’re lucky enough to never have to “question” your gender, as the story goes, congratulations! Move right along. If you’re less lucky, don’t worry, the answer is pretty simple: You can just “bravely” transition to the "right body," and live happily ever after.

But life, identity, and transitions — gender-related or otherwise — are never that easy. They’re often joyful, sure, but are also harrowing and full of surprises. For those of us who happen to be trans, the part of the story we rarely talk about is what happens after you're "finally yourself." How do you make your way in the world? If you’re anything like me, you carry a lot of questions: How do you navigate public spaces and dating apps, medicine and mass media, body issues and sexuality, your relationships with others, and perhaps most importantly, your relationship with yourself?

Back in 2011, when I first began testosterone, the media mostly considered trans people to be a recent, alien curiosity — and that was if our existence was validated at all, even in death. (The former is obviously false, given that trans people have existed throughout history and across cultures. The latter is sadly still rampant; just look to the routine, horrifying descriptions of murdered trans women that run in mainstream news outlets.) That’s partly why I got into journalism: to write the stories I wanted to see about trans people and gender more broadly. The media’s othering of us, it seemed, was a big part of the endemic violence trans and gender-nonconforming people face. I wrote a memoir, Man Alive, which came out in 2014: at the peak of a cultural fascination surrounding trans people’s bodies. It was intended to serve as a counternarrative to the neat-and-tidy triumphs I saw in trans-related puff profiles in magazines. It wasn’t so much about the binary journey from “female to male,” but the messy, universal process of learning how to face ghosts; in other words, transitioning from youth to adulthood.

Seven years since I first injected testosterone, I see that that simplistic, before-and-after narrative perpetuates a dangerous myth — that one can cross over to the “other side” and then live happily ever after. The truth is, no one makes any transition and lives happily ever after. It’s a lot of work to begin again. And life, no matter your gender, is just one long series of transitions. The work of being a person is learning how to navigate them.

My second book, Amateur, is about what came after that initial, heady rush of “finally becoming myself” was finished, and I faced the reality of a world that was suddenly foreign to me. Back in 2015, after the first few bittersweet years of feeling amazing in my body but at odds with some of the expectations of masculinity, I almost got into a street fight with a total stranger outside of my apartment in Manhattan. I realized then that I faced a crossroads: I could become the man I wanted to see in the world, or disappear into the toxic masculinity that surrounded me. I remembered a quote from the seminal Zen text, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.” I was, after all, beginning again. I decided to embrace it.

So I used Amateur to ask and answer every “basic” question that dogged me after my transition, because I’d rarely seen cisgender men question gender. I asked questions I was afraid to know the answers to, like “Why won’t anyone touch me?” and “Am I a 'real man'?” Incredibly, the question that started it all that day outside of my apartment — “Why do men fight?” — led me to learn how to box, and ended in that most storied of boxing venues, Madison Square Garden, where I became the first trans man to fight in its ring. I wanted to write a story about what happens after transition, when everyone but the body involved has moved on. Along the way, I realized that I didn’t “finally become myself” the day I first injected testosterone, or even the first year after, or the second. That was just the start.

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What I did learn in writing Amateur was that almost everyone struggles in a world that flattens narratives about gender, yet demands that we all be legible within it, whether trans, cis, or otherwise. Because of another harmful media narrative — that trans people are magical beings, and that we know all the answers — the scariest part can be, months or years down the line, admitting that you don’t have it all sorted out. But I also learned that every “weakness” has the potential to be a strength (from boxing, no less). Transitioning makes us beginners, and beginners have fresh eyes. Our questions aren’t foolish; they’re very smart — especially in a world where it’s taken for granted that gender is a defining part of our every social interaction.

The mundane details of our physical transitions may be a sensational way for media to tell our stories, but in “Amateur,” a new column for them., I want us — all of us, no matter your gender — to rewrite what it means to begin again, together. To question gender, as most trans people know, is to redefine it.

And so, I need your help:

What questions do you have about gender and identity that you're afraid to ask? What worries or bugs you? What are you struggling to understand, unpack, or challenge in order to live authentically? If you're a partner, friend, or parent of someone reckoning with gender identity in new ways, what has come up for you that you're not sure how to face? What is your deepest anxiety or greatest fear about your body or your place in the world? What do you wish you could understand better about yourself, or someone else? Where are you stuck?

No matter who you are — whether you're trans or are one of our partners, friends, coworkers, parents, or allies — you can ask questions that will help guide this project. Every week, I’ll write a column based on what bubbles up in my inbox. With your help, I’ll tackle desire, language, and the conversations happening within and beyond our communities. We’ll work together to expose how our past identities collide with our present bodies, and figure out how to be better people in the future for it.

In “Amateur,” we’re going to name the ways gender can be liberating and confining, and use that to figure out how to live authentically way after we’re “finally ourselves.” Whatever your gender, you are part of this story. Our stories are for everybody. Our questions are necessary. Let's ask them together.

Please send your questions about gender — no matter how basic, silly, or vulnerable, and no matter how you identify — to thomas@thomaspagemcbee.com, or anonymously through Thomas’ website. Each week, Thomas will be writing based on your responses.

them, a next-generation community platform, chronicles and celebrates the stories, people and voices that are emerging and inspiring all of us, ranging in topics from pop culture and style to politics and news, all through the lens of today’s LGBTQ community.